Using the three pounds of matter between his ears, Tony Zador came up with an idea. Instead of looking closely at all the individual neurons to understand the connections in the brain, he would take advantage of a cost-effective way to monitor those links.

A professor of biology and program chair of neuroscience at Cold Spring Harbor, Zador has created a bar-coding system in which he hopes to label each neuron. He also plans to monitor the connections among those neurons.

Scientists “know a lot about individual neurons, but far less about how they’re wired up,” Zador said. “Much of the scientific community believes that disorders like autism and schizophrenia arise from problems with wiring. My core interest is in understanding how we go from a wired-up brain to behavior.”

The way our brains work has become a new frontier in science, as President Obama announced a new brain initiative. The effort is designed to enhance our understanding of the mind, help combat diseases and disorders, and lead to new companies and jobs.

Zador’s bar-coding approach differs from that of many other researchers.

“Very smart people at great places — MIT, Harvard, Stanford — are all trying to develop the technology to put together a wiring diagram using electron microscope images. The problem is, even if they succeed, it’s incredibly expensive,” Zador said.

The cost of sequencing genes has gone down precipitously over the last decade. About 10 years ago, the cost for determining the order of base pairs for a person was about $1 billion. Today, that is now about $1,000 to $3,000, Zador estimated.

“If we could somehow convert the problem of figuring out the connectivity of the brain to a problem of sequencing DNA, then this problem, in principal, would be quick and cheap,” he said.

The way this works is by studying mice in which each neuron has a unique DNA label (created by his lab). He believes those labels will not affect the circuitry of the brain, although he plans to test that hypothesis. By looking at these circuits, he will be able to get an idea of how they connect.

The science is a “work in progress,” he said. He’s about to submit a proof of principle that shows how the process works.

If and when this system works and the researchers can determine the typical connections in the brain, they might start looking at the brains in a mouse model of autism.

“It’s quite plausible to believe we’ll get a much better understanding of what’s going on in the brain of someone with autism or schizophrenia if we can understand what happens in a mouse that has those genes disrupted in the way they are in humans,” he said.

Knowing what the normal circuit looks like is a starting point that opens up a wide range of questions.

At this point, one of the theories about autism is that some of the longer-range neuronal connections are impaired, while the local connections are more active.

If that turns out to be the case, scientists might be able to use different drugs to enhance one type of connection while quieting the effect of another.

While Zador came up with an idea he believes will work, his background in physiology and computational and theoretical science didn’t prepare him to develop the molecular biology techniques he’d need for his research. An avid runner who covers five or six miles each day — either outside the lab or on a treadmill — Zador used to run alone.

For the last five or six years, he’s run a few times a week with Josh Dubnau. A colleague at CSHL, Dubnau provides a “one hour tutorial” on molecular biology with each run — while discussing other scientific challenges and, on occasion, politics.

A resident of Laurel Hollow, which is within walking distance of the lab, Zador and his wife Kathy Shamoun, who practices Chinese medicine at Cold Spring Harbor and is also a childbirth educator, have two sons, 7-year-old Ronin and 3-year-old Bowie.

Zador recognizes his research is going in a different direction from other scientists.

“What are the chances it’s going to work?” he wonders. “I’m betting my career on it. I’m enthusiastic and optimistic.”

Correction:

In the article “BNL’s James Dickerson: facilitating nanotechnology” that ran last week, we incorrectly reported how long the Center for Functional Nanomaterials has been open. The building has been open for 5 years. We regret the error.

James “Jay” Dickerson isn’t sitting back and waiting for people to come to him. The assistant director at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Dickerson is actively looking to find ways for the technological powerhouse to collaborate with everyone from small-business owners with innovative ideas to scientists to multinational companies.

“We at CFN need to reach out to the industrial community in Long Island, New York state and the mid-Atlantic area,” he said. “We sometimes are guilty of saying ‘Hey, we’re here. Come and find us.’”

This problem is most evident, he said, with small businesses that may have brilliant ideas, but may not have the resources to use expensive equipment, the background, or the contacts to use nanotechnology characterization or equipment.

At CFN, he suggests they have waited for people from industry to come to them. He suggests a more efficient approach involves actively pursuing and engaging local companies through workshops to show them what is available.

A facility that’s about 10 years old, the CFN is housed in a two-story glass building on the BNL campus. The research ranges from electronic nanomaterials, including structures for photovoltaics and electrochemical energy storage systems, to soft and biological nanomaterials, theory and computation, electron microscopy and nanoscale catalysis and interface science.

“We are a Department of Energy facility,” Dickerson said. “That means our taxpayer dollars are paying for our facilities. My personal interest is not just helping out the scientific community, be it universities or national labs, but also helping out the commercial or industrial community.”

That could include facilitating companies to conduct research in areas that will help their bottom line, either through nonproprietary research, in which the results of the experiments are expected to be published, or through proprietary research, in which the results of the studies can remain privately held. In the latter case, the companies provide full cost recovery for use of the facilities, capabilities and expertise that the center would incur.

“If you’re a company that is a manufacturer of a type of material that might have a nanostructure, feel free to contact me,” he offered.

Since he arrived, Dickerson said he has worked with companies interested in proprietary and nonproprietary research, including electronic and biomedical materials device companies.

The physical, chemical and mechanical properties of nanomaterials tend to be different from the same properties for larger materials, even when the atoms of both are identical. Scientists explore ways to exploit those properties for new devices, processes, and materials.

Dickerson said he expects some of the products companies are developing with the CFN may become commercially available (either individually or as a part of something else) within the next 10 years.

In his own research, Dickerson has examined the relationships between the structure, size and optical properties of rare earth oxides, such as europium sesquioxide. Many cathode ray tube TV screens used europium-based compounds to produce red color. His work looks toward applications, such as in highly efficient display devices and X-ray intensifying screens.

“I’m really interested in understanding fundamentally how the structure, composition, and the physical properties of nanomaterials correlate with each other. Particularly, I’m interested in trying to understand how the structure of a material, down to very small nanoscale, relates to how magnetism evolves as you shrink materials further and further down, approaching a single molecule of europium and sulfur.”

A past chairman of the Committee on Minorities in Physics of the American Physical Society, Dickerson was a recipient of an APS scholarship in 1989 and 1990.

His participation on the committee was a chance to “help those students in kindergarten through 12th grade, as well as students in undergraduate programs, at junior colleges and graduate students in their progression to the next stage in their academic lives and careers,” he said.

The number of minorities in physics has grown over the last 25 years, he said, but it’s still not “exactly reflective of the demographics of minorities in greater society. That’s something we’re endeavoring to improve.”

He said the imbalance needs to be addressed not just for the sake of having a balance in the numbers, but to solve the nation’s need for more technology and science development.

A resident of Brooklyn, Dickerson is married to Courtney Martin, an art historian and professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

Dickerson encourages anyone with an interest in BNL’s facilities, to meet their commercial or research goals, to reach out to him.

Enormous and powerful though they were, dinosaurs didn’t appear on the Earth and muscle out other animals — mostly reptiles. Somehow, many of those reptiles, who were eating, sleeping and reproducing for about 50 million years during the Triassic period, died during a major extinction event, making it possible for dinosaurs to dominate during the Jurassic period.

What, scientists have wondered, caused such a major shift from one set of creatures to another?

In a new paper in the prestigious journal Science, researchers from Stony Brook University, Columbia, MIT, Rutgers and Université Mohammet Premier in Oujda, Morocco believe they may have the answer.

These scientists, including Associate Professor Troy Rasbury from SBU, looked at rocks in Newark, N.J., and Hartford, Conn., that were a part of an area called the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, which is likely the largest of the Large Igneous Provinces. These rocks suggest that a large outpouring of gases and aerosols may have been responsible for the extinction.

The lava and gases were released in four pulses over 600,000 years, which is a relatively short time frame for such violent environmental changes.

Scientists had known about the extinction and the lava flows, but they hadn’t been able to pinpoint the time frame over which the Earth may have been less habitable. During the Triassic period, the Earth was just starting to break apart from a period when it was the supercontinent called Pangaea.

The researchers used a process called uranium-lead dating using zircon. Zircon crystals that are millions of years old are extremely resistant to lead. They do, however, include uranium. The only way lead, however, can become embedded in the crystals is if it starts out as an isotope of uranium and decays slowly into lead.

This dating technique, coupled with others that examine the periodic effect of other celestial bodies like the planets in our milky way, has greatly enhanced the ability to narrow down the time span during which these major events occurred.

“There’s definitely rocks contemporaneous with extinction,” said Rasbury. “We can imagine that there’s a lot of gases that come with that, as they’re being erupted. There’s an out-gassing and an environmental deterioration. That’s the link.”

Rasbury praised the work of her colleagues, who have done “a tremendous job” by analyzing samples that were collected from the surface.

“That’s what makes this such a special study. The ages are demonstrating that it’s plausible,” she said. The coincident timing of the presence of these gases and the animal turnover suggests there may be a causal link between the mass extinction and the relatively sudden environmental change.

Rasbury’s main role in this study is to bring the team together. She put together the National Science Foundation proposal that provided some of the funding for this research.

Rasbury and her colleagues at Stony Brook will soon be able to do some of the same research on other rock samples. The university received funding for a mass spectrometer. The lab had a grand reopening on April 19.

“The equipment is here and there’s a lot of hard work in front of us to make sure we can do the high-precision analysis,” she said. “It requires an enormous amount of attention to details.”

Born in North Carolina but raised in Texas, Rasbury speaks at a rapid pace.

“I had a professor at the University of New Orleans who said he didn’t know it was possible to have a Texas accent and talk that fast,” she laughed.

Her identical twin Sidney Rasbury Hemming, who was born 27 minutes before Troy, is also a geologist and attends some of the same professional gatherings.

“I was at a meeting and everybody was calling me Sidney because we talk and laugh the same,” she said.

Rasbury is married to Department of Geosciences Professor William Holt. The couple, who live in East Setauket, have two daughters. Rebecca, 12, is in sixth grade at Setauket School while Virginia, who will be 9 next month, is in third grade.

The house is filled with rocks, although Rasbury said her daughters bring many of them in from the beaches. Her daughters also love to go to gem and mineral shows.

She and her husband talk about geology at home “as long as our kids will let us.”

Like other parts of the body, the brain produces waste that needs to be cleared away. Through the so-called glymphatic system, the brain uses a type of water channel to remove tau proteins and other products.

When the glymphatic system isn’t functioning properly, these proteins do not clear correctly from the brain. From this research, scientists believe a breakdown may lead to or exacerbate problems related to the development of Alzheimer’s or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a progressive degenerative disease that is often caused by multiple concussions.

“Normally, we produce proteins and peptides that are getting excreted,” explained Helene Benveniste, a professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Radiology at Stony Brook University’s School of Medicine. It’s not under a lot of pressure, so it’s a slower process, but it’s like taking a water hose to a dirty street, she said. “If this system doesn’t work, compounds may build up and could lead to diseases.”

While scientists and medical researchers knew a defect in the clearing system could lead to neurological problems, they weren’t sure how to track the clearing process in real time.

That’s where Benveniste — who works one day a week in the operating room as a clinical anesthesiologist and the rest of the time in research — entered the picture. Using magnetic resonance imaging, she was able to use two different contrast agents to map this pathway, where she also found important clearance pathways for brain waste. The studies were done on an animal model.

The contrast approach is “a common way of detecting leaks,” she explained.

By using this same technique, she and her team were able to follow the glymphatic process, which often operated in parallel to major arteries.

Using these imaging techniques, doctors may be able to monitor the human brain to determine disease susceptibility. Through several MRI views over time, doctors might be able to detect signs of problems with the glymphatic system before a patient shows any symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

She hopes one day that doctors will track individuals who “may be susceptible” to Alzheimer’s.

“Anything we can do now to understand how a pathological process is building or is imminently developing in a human with the end result of Alzheimer’s is incredibly valuable,” said Benveniste.

While there is no cure for Alzheimer’s, tracking it before an intellectual slide into a potentially irreversible course of the disease may provide some effective preclinical intervention.

If doctors could slow down Alzheimer’s by 20 to 30 percent, they might not prevent people from getting the disease, but they might extend the time period during which individuals can live independent lives, she suggested.

“The impact on health costs and society is tremendous,” Benveniste said. “Do I think this is just a diagnostic tool or could it teach us something about how we might treat Alzheimer’s? The answer is yes, this might be important for that purpose.”

The challenge, and it’s significant, is to understand how the glympathic system works in the human brain, so that doctors can manipulate it.

There are also studies that show that some people have tau and amyloid in their brains who don’t show signs of Alzheimer’s. However, she said, there are pathological diagnostic criteria which can quantify the impact of the proteins present and often, the severity of the pathology correlates with the cognitive decline.

If, as Benveniste believes, these channels become critically important early signs of a susceptibility to disease or a preclinical state for the disease, researchers would also need to develop more therapies.

She doesn’t have any direct family experience with Alzheimer’s. She feels blessed that her 93-year-old mother is still sharp mentally.

A native of Copenhagen, Benveniste came to the United States in 1989, where she worked at Duke for 11 years. She came to Stony Brook in 2000.

She travels regularly back to Denmark. Those trips may prove especially valuable because Stony Brook is obtaining a PET/MRI machine, which is expected to be installed in the summer. In Copenhagen, they have had this same system up and running for over a year and she plans to travel in the next few months to Copenhagen to see how they are running their machine.

She and her husband, Peter Huttemeier, a retired anesthesiologist, met in Copenhagen. They live in Northport, where being so close to the water reminds them of Denmark.

As for her work, Benveniste hopes that the ability to track the glymphatic system leads to considerably more research from her colleagues in and out of Stony Brook.

Demian Chapman has one of those jobs that turns heads at social gatherings: he’s a shark biologist. The New Zealand native, who is also an assistant professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, is in the middle of studying the oceanic whitetip sharks.

Known for living far from land, the whitetips, which eat tuna, mahi mahi, marlin and squid, have declined precipitously in numbers in the last few decades, in part because some people consider their fins a delicacy.

Chapman, his wife Debra Abercrombie — also a shark biologist — and several other researchers recently published results of a study on the whitetips. Starting in 2011, Abercrombie and other field biologists went to the Bahamas, where the waters are aggressively patrolled and the sharks are actively protected, to fit some sharks with pop-up satellite tags that could track their location.

As Chapman explained it, the researchers put bait in the water near the Bahamas at a time when the sharks are closer to land. If it’s alone, the first shark won’t typically approach a piece of bait. Once other sharks arrive for a meal, however, the shark’s competitive instincts take over and it becomes easier — albeit still a struggle — to reel them in.

The researchers slip a rope around the tail of the shark and then drive the boat slowly while they outfit the cartilaginous fish with a tag. Chapman said the tags, which weigh only a few grams, are probably barely noticeable to the sharks, which can be as long as eight feet and can weigh about 150 pounds.

What the tags showed was that one of the sharks traveled about 2,000 kilometers, or over 1,200 miles, in under a year. Five of the sharks traveled outside the exclusive economic zone (or EEZ) for the Bahamas, where they are better protected. This suggests that more countries might need to safeguard these sharks.

This March, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora is meeting in Bangkok, where representatives from several countries will consider whether to list this species. Such a listing would mean that permits would be required to trade the species across international boundaries. People caught trading the species without those permits would face penalties.

The sharks “do spend a lot of time in the Bahamas, where they are well protected,” Chapman said. “The fact that they do leave raises concerns. If you don’t have some parallel measures outside the Bahamas, that may undermine what the Bahamas has done.”

Chapman hopes that this paper, along with further research, helps to raise awareness of the delicate state of the shark population.

Countries vote to determine which species make it to different protected lists. A species has to get two-thirds of the vote.

“It’s difficult to get,” Chapman said. “Some countries that are pro-shark trade — if they consume fins — will never vote for a shark to be” on the list.

There’s definitely politicking at these meetings, he said, where some countries vote to list species in exchange for the votes of other countries on other organisms.

Chapman went to Asia in late February to help train customs agents to recognize the fins of different sharks.

Unusual for his combined expertise in DNA analysis and field work, Chapman made a remarkable find in 2005. A female hammerhead shark had been in an aquarium without any access to males for about three years. After all that time in isolation, it gave birth. The aquarium sent a copy of the mother and pup’s DNA to Chapman. He concluded that the shark had given a so-called virgin birth.

While impossible in mammals, animals like sharks, snakes and turkeys can somehow combine an unfertilized egg with the genetic code of a polar body, which essentially acts like a sperm.

The polar bodies are “cells that could have been an egg” but were produced during the production of eggs, he said.

Residents of Miller Place, where they recently purchased a house, Chapman and Abercrombie, who is originally from South Carolina and is a consultant for the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, met when they were at a field station in the Bahamas.

Chapman tries to avoid the “Shark Week” series on the Discovery Channel because of the frequent recreations of shark attacks.

“They try to add a conservation message,” Chapman said, “but it’s difficult to reconcile how the sharks need to be protected” after people have watched them attack swimmers.

As for working with sharks, he said he’s never had a “bad experience with them.”

Aaron Stein was hired to work at a place that existed only on paper. About a decade ago, the physicist agreed to work at Brookhaven National Lab’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials, even though BNL hadn’t started construction on the cutting edge facility.

“I see something that went from an idea to a hole in the ground to a place where lots of science is being done,” Stein said.

Indeed, Stein, who earned a Ph.D. in physics from Stony Brook University, was the first official hire at the CFN, which is one of only five nanoscale science research centers funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The study of nanomaterials involves examining how to exploit or understand physical and chemical changes that occur at an incredibly small scale. While construction of a skyscraper follows certain laws of physics — such as how much weight a load-bearing wall can support — the manufacture of objects, such as fuel cells or computer parts, is guided by other forces and interactions.

“There are certain things you’d never see otherwise if not for shrinking them down to that size scale, either due to quantum effects, size effects — you have more surface area — or other things,” Stein explained. “Everything changes and gets weird and interesting on the nano scale.”

Stein has worked in nanomagnetism, X-ray optics and photovoltaics, among many others.

Working with nanomagnets isn’t all that different, he explained, from using the bar magnets children use in middle school, except that the scale, functionality and experiments are considerably altered.

“The side I’m on is in making these magnets,” he said. “We make millions of these magnets at a time and play with the physics. We’re building our own little playground to test theories and observe” the results.

Stein has worked with Kenneth Evans-Lutterrodt, a staff scientist at BNL, since his days as a Ph.D. candidate at Stony Brook. The two have worked for years developing and honing miniature lenses that could have applications ranging from creating higher resolution and better contrast diagnostic X-ray images all the way to looking at the stress, on an atomic level, of a helicopter bearing.

“We have spent many years developing the ideas behind this,” Evans-Lutterodt said. “We look at what new design to try. He does the e-beam lithography.”

In e-beam lithography, a tiny piece of silicon is coated with a material called a resist. The material scientists like Stein uses varies, depending on what they are trying to manufacture. The researcher shoots an electron beam at the resist. The resist is sensitive to electrons in the same way that film is sensitive to light: after exposure, it is developed and the contrast can be used to create structures or finely crafted objects that are of almost any shape and size, Stein said.

Evans-Lutterodt uses the lenses Stein makes in collaborations with other scientists. The lenses themselves, he said, are not like the ones that sit in prescription glasses: they have considerably more curvature.

“The shape is quite asymmetric,” Evans-Lutterodt said. “It’s very difficult to bend X-rays. The lenses are also made out of silicon, which is opaque to visible light, but somewhat transmissive to X-ray.”

As far as a commercial application, Evans-Luterrodt said he would expect it to take about three years, optimistically, before he and Stein had developed a commercial application from their research.

Stein’s goal is to “enable science.”

As for his own work, much of it is in understanding the limits of the tools and the materials he is employing.

“A big part of the job,” he said, “is to keep the lab humming.” That includes making sure the equipment is maintained, the supplies are available, and the tools are in the same condition for everyone.

Stein also spends considerable time focusing on the environmental components of nanofabrication, ensuring that everyone who comes into the lab goes home safely.

A resident of Huntington, Stein is married to Sasha Abraham, who is a member of an advocacy group that works on prostate awareness and screening. They have an 11-year-old daughter, Lily, and a 9-year-old son, Henry.

Stein grew up in Syracuse and said he never imagined coming to Long Island to build his life and career.

“There are a narrow set of places I could work,” he explained. “Probably, where I am now, is really an ideal situation for me.”

This is the second part of a two-part series on four Stony Brook University researchers who recently received an NSF Career Award. Designed to give researchers in the early part of their careers a financial boost before they compete against established scientists for the same dollars, the award funds projects, allows the scientists to expand their educational goals and offers recognition.

Last week, the Times Beacon Record Newspapers featured questions and answers with Radu Laza and Jonathan Rudick. This week, the paper will have insights from Alex Orlov and Emre Salman.

Alex Orlov

TBR: Are you excited to win this award?

Orlov: This was absolutely delightful news. Receiving this award, especially just before significant budget cuts to science, is even more amazing.

TBR: What will these funds enable you to do? Will you hire anyone new? Will you do more teaching?

Orlov: These funds will have a huge impact on my research focused on sustainable energy. It will also allow us to start new collaborations with Brookhaven National Lab and with other groups outside Stony Brook (University). I expect to hire several undergraduate and graduate students, who will be working on this project. There will be also a very significant impact on undergraduate and graduate teaching here.

Almost 80 graduate and undergraduate students are taking my courses and this project will allow me to introduce several innovative case studies based on this funded project into the classroom. We are also planning to develop new teaching techniques for engineering courses to help students (high school and university ones) to educate them on designing better consumer products while protecting the environment.

TBR: Is there anything new in your lab since we spoke? [The Times Beacon Record profiled Orlov on Dec. 18.]

Orlov: [He was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in Britain in February.] The fellowship is something very exciting. There are also several interesting projects I am doing in collaboration with my colleagues (I am the principal investigator, but a significant player), such as developing a new computer game to educate students on environmental topics. There is a paper which was just accepted where we found a better way to get hydrogen fuel from water.

Emre Salman

TBR: How would you characterize the scope of your research?

Salman: Our research activities focus on high performance and energy efficient integrated circuits. We develop design techniques for next generation microprocessors, mobile computing devices as well as communication chips. We also investigate emerging integrated circuit technologies to overcome the fundamental limitations of current electronic systems such as high power consumption. At the NanoCAS Lab, our workstations are equipped with the latest electronic design automation software that allow us to verify our algorithms, models and design techniques.

Our ultimate objective is to develop future integrated circuits that are more portable, can interact with the environment, consume low power, yet still offer significant computing capability.

TBR: How will you use the funds from the award?

Salman: The NSF Career funds will support between one and two Ph.D. students in my research group (NanoCAS Lab) for five years. Part of the funds will be used to fabricate and test a three-dimensional integrated circuit to demonstrate and validate our methodologies. Furthermore, a scholarship will be available to an undergraduate student each year. Our objective is to provide undergraduate students with real research experience in our lab. These research activities will be integrated with multiple educational initiatives such as developing new course modules and outreach events for high school students within Long Island.

TBR: What would you tell those who are considering a career in research?

Salman: I would encourage them. It is fascinating to spend time on something that is not yet known by anybody. The hard part is to ask the right questions. If the questions are right, I believe the answers are likely to come, even though it may take some time. It is also very rewarding to share these experiences through teaching.

TBR: Where do you live?

Salman: I have been on Long Island since September 2010 and currently live in Sound Beach. I grew up in a small town on the Mediterranean coast in Turkey, so I enjoy being close to water. I like the nature of Long Island, hiking trails and its close proximity to New York City.

Children were falling through the cracks. A decade ago, when a child developed signs of a problem that primarily affects adults, their pediatricians generally had little or no experience, while the medical care workers who did hadn’t worked with children.

It was a problem Lauren Krupp decided needed action. A professor in clinical neurology and a practicing physician at Stony Brook University, Krupp founded the National Pediatric Multiple Sclerosis Center, which was recently renamed the Lourie Center for Pediatric MS.

“We saw parents who were frightened and who were told that multiple sclerosis can’t occur in children, which is obviously not true, or they were told, ‘Yes, it is multiple sclerosis, but I’m an adult neurologist,’” Krupp recalled. “It makes a real difference to parents if they can take their child somewhere where there’s experience with something that’s rare.”

About 3 percent to 5 percent of the MS population has a disease that begins before age 18. Among children, MS occurs once for about every 100,000 people, Krupp estimated.

Krupp has been working with some of the other facilities designated as Regional Centers of Excellence by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society to develop a better understanding of the way MS progresses in children. Recently, she joined with several other researchers to publish research about the potential cognitive effects of the disease.

“This was the first time a uniform approach to looking at kids and their cognitive functioning was taken across the country,” she said. “We also included children at a very early stage of the disease.”

Children who had only one attack had an 18 percent frequency of cognitive problems. In children with more than one attack, the cognitive problems rise to about 33 percent.

As an example, she cited the case of a teenager who loved playing in her school band. All of a sudden, she was getting failing grades in music. The problem had nothing to do with music — she couldn’t remember her locker combination.

Some children with MS don’t need additional services (and may need a locker with a key instead of a combination lock), while others could need anything from having someone take notes in class, to getting extra time for tests, Krupp suggested.

“Cognition needs to be considered,” she explained. “We’re very eager to come up with interventions” to improve treatment.

She’s exploring the possibility of developing strategies that don’t necessarily involve medication.

“There’s a lot of promise in innovative computer-based training programs,” she said. She hopes to study some of these models in the next several months.

Krupp has also organized a camp called Teen Adventure, where children from 13 to 18 with multiple sclerosis can “go out there and do stuff and be like other kids.”

The camp enables networking among the children. Krupp says she doesn’t attend because she doesn’t want to “medicalize” the experience, although there is a team of experts, including nurse practitioners and recreational therapists, on site.

Krupp believes her efforts, as well as those of others in her field, including the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, have helped the medical community become aware of pediatric multiple sclerosis.

In people who have MS, the immune system attacks the myelin, or protective sheath around the axons of the brain and spinal cord, potentially leading to neurological, physical and cognitive problems.

The cause of MS, a disease in which the symptoms can include weakness, visual problems, numbness and trouble speaking, involves an interaction between a genetic predisposition and environmental factors.

Some studies have shown that the farther away people live from the equator, the higher the incidence of MS. Indeed, children born near the equator who move before the age of 15 develop MS at the same rate as those who have lived all their lives farther from the equator.

“We think the reason for this has to do with higher prevalence of sunlight exposure,” offered Krupp.

Sunlight is among the biggest sources of vitamin D. Doctors have different approaches to vitamin D. Many think the best strategy is to maintain a normal to high vitamin D level in the blood and use vitamin D doses as needed, she said.

Krupp and her partner live in Setauket. They have twin daughters, Gina and Alexa, who are on their respective sailing teams in college.

People who are interested in finding out more about the camp, Krupp’s research efforts, or ways to help can visit www.pediatricmscenter.org.

Krupp’s professional goal is simple: “To be put out of business. I would like to see the disease ended.”

Back when she was in Boston, Raffaella Sordella was a part of an incredible discovery. Some patients with non-small cell lung cancer had mutations that made their tumors sensitive to drugs such as Tarceva and Iressa.

When the patients took the medicine twice a day, “the tumor was shrinking,” recalled Sordella. “Within a couple of weeks, the patient could resume a normal life, more or less.”

To top it off, the drug didn’t have all the side effects of conventional chemotherapy.

“This was a turning point in my career,” explained Sordella, who is originally from Turin, Italy, and was conducting her research at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The promising therapy for these patients, however, wasn’t as effective as researchers, clinicians and patients had hoped. Within a year, the tumors in even these patients had developed a resistance to the drugs.

Undeterred, Sordella decided she would search for reasons for the change. Now an associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor, Sordella is pursuing several possible explanations which she hopes one day will extend the effectiveness of drugs.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in the world. It was responsible for 160,340 deaths in the United States in 2012, according to the American Cancer Society. More than 226,000 cases were diagnosed last year.

Tarceva and Iressa were sometimes effective initially on the tumors that harbor specific mutations because they blocked the epidermal growth factor receptors (or EGFR). Without signals from the EGFR sites, the tumors either stopped growing or began shrinking.

As Sordella and others have observed, however, these drugs became less effective over time. One possible explanation was that the cancers were changing, developing a secondary mutation that altered the way the tumor grew or developed. That likely accounted for about half of the cases. In the rest, scientists now know that resistance can develop through other mechanisms, such as the expression of other genes.

“If we understand the mechanism, we can slow down the process,” she explained. Scientists may not find a cure in the short term, but they may be able to extend the period when the tumors are sensitive to the drug out from one year.

Sordella discovered that the interleukin-6 protein, which was produced during inflammation, was responsible for decreasing the sensitivity of the tumor to the drugs.

Resistance was increased “by factors secreted during inflammation,” Sordella observed.

By turning off or blocking interleukin-6, researchers may be able to create a combination of drugs that blocks the growth and spread of tumors.

This, Sordella offered, would be considerably easier than trying to anticipate and stop the next cancerous mutation.

When she first started exploring the ways tumors might develop drug resistance, the most obvious, and medically most challenging possibility was that the tumor was heterogeneous, which means that it had a mix of cells with different genetic codes that kept it several steps ahead of the available drugs.

Sordella feels a scientific urgency to continue with her research, in the hopes of helping those suffering with cancer.

“What we are doing is not just for us,” she said. “It can make a difference to patients.”

Sordella and her husband Manuel Barriola, a theoretical physicist who works as a consultant, live on campus at Cold Spring Harbor. They have two daughters, Victoria, who is in second grade and Alicia, who is in kindergarten.

Sordella and her husband, who is from Spain, miss their connection to Europe. She explained that the Italian culture she grew up with is considerably different from that for third-generation Italian Americans.

“When I was in Boston, there was this old guy that learned I was Italian,” she recalled. “He spoke to me in what he thought was Italian.” Sordella suspected that he was speaking a dialect from Sicily and wasn’t able to understand a single word.

Sordella enjoys going to Manhattan to people watch. She said she doesn’t think about her research when she’s in the city, even though she knows cancer is so prevalent that any medical breakthrough could make a difference for everyone.

African violets

Continued from page B16

Any number of small insect pests, including aphids and spider mites as well as mealybugs, can attack African violets. I find that the yellow sticky traps are very helpful in dealing with insect pests in the house in general. If that doesn’t work, you may have to resort to using a pesticide. Make sure that the one you select can be used on houseplants and that you follow directions carefully.

Prevention is the best route to take. Check any new acquisitions carefully before bringing them into the house. You may also want to quarantine them for a few weeks so that if there is a problem it won’t affect your entire houseplant collection.

For more information, the African Violet Society of America can be reached at www.avsa.org.

Ellen Barcel is a freelance writer and master gardener. To reach Cornell Cooperative Extension and its Master Gardener Program, call 727-7850.

By Daniel Dunaief

After searching in 40 other places — albeit from millions of miles away — Deanne Rogers and her scientific colleagues from the U.S. and U.K. found what they were seeking. Using images beamed back to Earth, they found minerals on rocks that typically form in the presence of water.

The discovery, in the McLaughlin Crater on Mars, where deposits are probably 3.8 billion years old or older, is consistent with an expanding body of knowledge about the Red Planet.

“I almost expected we should see something like this,” explained Rogers, an assistant professor of geoscience at Stony Brook. “A lot of recent observations point to groundwater in the subsurface. There was a hint of water deep in the subsurface.”

Without channels going into or out of the basin, scientists suggested that the water likely came from under the ground.

Much of the water on Mars is likely a result of volcanic activity, although comet impacts may have also carried some. The water likely percolated through soil that is much more porous on Mars than it is on Earth. It likely collected several kilometers below the surface. The water may have come back up in deep basins, such as the McLaughlin Crater.

Indeed, there could still be water in the Martian crust.

If manned missions went to Mars, experts have suggested that the astronauts might need to find water on the planet to drink while they’re there and to restock their supplies for the long journey back to Earth.

Rogers suggested that astronauts probably wouldn’t be able to drill deep enough to get any groundwater. Some scientists, however, have been working on how to free the water trapped in the minerals on the rocks. By heating the rocks, astronauts might be able to release water. They could also go to high latitudes, where there is water ice within centimeters of the surface.

So far, the McLaughlin crater “is the only place where we find evidence of these minerals” together in a basin setting, Rogers offered. Some are covered in dust, which obstructs the scientists’ view, while others may never have had water upwell in that region.

The presence of water, even long ago, might suggest that conditions on Mars could have supported life. Those extraterrestrial organisms could have lived in the subsurface, where they might be sheltered from the harsh environment on the surface.

Despite the pervasive dust, Mars presents a clearer picture in some areas of geological processes than the Earth. Plate tectonics — the slow movement of the enormous landmasses on which the continents rest — on our planet muddy the waters of interpreting how the planet may have changed over its history.

Mars, however, does not have any such movement of tectonic plates. Additionally, the meteorites that slammed into its surface have helped reveal what is and was beneath the surface.

“It’s a lot easier to study craters on Mars because they are well preserved,” explained Rogers. “On Earth, they are buried under vegetation or erased from Earth’s surface” by the movement of the plates and by erosion or weathering.

Rogers explained that she has divided her research into analyzing data sent from orbiters and studying the properties of similar rocks and minerals that other researchers at Stony Brook have created.

“We can look at the spectra of altered samples to compare it to Martian data,” she explained. “We can confirm it in the lab.”

She also does some remote sensing of the moon and asteroids.

Rogers lives in Selden with Tim Glotch, who is also an associate professor in the same department (see July 17, 2012 issue), and their two preschool-age children.

Glotch, Rogers and a few other Stony Brook faculty are working on a multidisciplinary proposal, which is due in April, that considers the possibility of human exploration of the moon and asteroids. Glotch is the lead investigator, while Rogers and others have responsibilities specific to their expertise.

Their research is benefiting from a resurgence of interest in Mars, in part because of the newest rover, Curiosity.

Rogers said she hopes to continue to participate in research on Mars because “there are so many things left unexplored at this point.”